“I’ve been reintroduced to my genius.”

Nabila launches Zero, a tweaked and reinvented version of her No Makeup palette for an international market.

Nabila can easily be credited for reinventing and setting new standards for fashion and style in Pakistan – giving much needed facelifts to fashion weeks, award show red carpets and the generally fashionably challenged. This weekend she reinvented one of her own products, the No Makeup Palette, and reintroduced it as Zero Makeup.

The original product, compartmentalized all in one skin concealer, blender, blush, lip tint and setting powder palette, was released two years ago.

“I realized as soon as I uncorked the genie that the response was much better than I expected so very quickly I realized the need to take this ahead of Pakistan,” Nabila spoke to us before the swanky launch of the palette in Karachi. “I wanted to make it global so I decided to sacrifice my name for the brand. I saw a bigger picture and didn’t want the product to be limited to a geography or gender. I just wanted to transcend everything.”

The eponymous palette was previously called Nabila 0 and read as NO, so she dropped her name and went with a minimalist Zero. The packaging is similar but the matte grey exterior has been replaced with chrome and Nabila has allegedly improved on the formula as well.

“Whatever imperfections I saw with my unforgiving eye have been corrected,” she shared. “The lip colour is longer stay and the powder is more translucent.” The product range has also been customized for women all over the world in six shades as opposed to just catering to South Asian complexions like before. Lastly, but most importantly for Nabila, she shares that she’s been able to lower the price of the product by Rs. 2000, taking into consideration social media feedback.

“Zero is a brand that I want to make very disruptive and I want to keep coming out with such products.” She shares that there are other products in R&D – a concealer corrector for men, a contour system for women and some hair tools. We remember her launching the Magicurl in her salons a few years ago when the product was relatively new. “It was great while it lasted but now I’m not into curly hair,” Nabila says. “The problem with me is that I only want to sell what I like.”

Last year we heard that the No Makeup palette was being used on the sets of Grey’s Anatomy. Nabila shares that it got picked up in the US by a company that took the initial samples to test and then a makeup artist’s union picked up the products, which is how it ended up on the sets of Hollywood. That sparked the original US company’s interest and Nabila has partnered with them to launch a company in the States later this month.

Thirty-two years into her career, one wonders if Nabila ever tires of the image making industry because like others who’ve spent the same amount of time in the industry, she has not lent her name to any other line. “I do so many things within my own field that my day is never stagnant or predictable. I have different branches so I’m either training, putting together hair or makeup shoots, editorials, putting together fashion weeks or awards, looking at content creation, marketing, HR – whatever aspects there are to my business – my week is designed in a way that I’m never bored.”

“The past couple of years I’ve been travelling and have been reintroduced to my genius,” she chuckles. “I thought I was good at the service industry but then I realized my ability to whip up products is great. I’m loving the shift I’m making from service to retail. While the service industry is very dear to me, I’m leveraging my name and going into disruptive products – that’s the future of Nabila.”